Frederick Douglass and the Underground Railroad – Livestream Tour

Frederick Douglass and the Underground Railroad
– Livestream Tour –
 
Sunday, February 13, 2022 at 3:30 PM

Register HERE

Join us for an online/virtual tour of the Frederick Douglass heritage sites in Maryland and Washington, D.C., as well a discussion on how how Frederick successfully escaped from slavery and then was an active conductor on the Underground Railroad until the eve of the Civil War. Learn about his connections to John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman and others!

Our program will focus on Frederick Douglass’ inspirational life and feature many of the sites within the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore metropolitan area associated with his life. We’ll include an overview of the Eastern Shore, Baltimore City, Old Anacostia, as well as Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia.

Frederick Douglass (c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counter-example to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.

Douglass wrote several autobiographies, notably describing his experiences as a slave in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which became a bestseller, and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Following the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).

The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early to mid-19th century, and used by enslaved African-Americans to escape into free states and Canada. The scheme was assisted by abolitionists and others sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. Not literally but metaphorically a railroad, the enslaved who risked escape and those who aided them are also collectively referred to as the “Underground Railroad”.

This program is presented by Lost History USA and your host is John Muller, co-founder of Lost History USA (www.losthistoryUSA.com) and author of Frederick Douglass in Washington, D.C.: The Lion of Anacostia.

Amazon Link – Frederick Douglass: The Lion of Anacostia

Your co-host for this program is the non-profit community organization Washington, DC History & Culture.

Links for two previous Underground Railroad programs we organized are provided below.

Baltimore In-Person Underground Railroad Tour Link:

Harriet Tubman Program with WMAR (Baltimore’s ABC-affiliate) Link: